


what time may do

by burnttongueontea



Series: time, as a symptom [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Adam-turned-them-human AU, Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Gen, Light Angst, Mortality, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), pet death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:00:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnttongueontea/pseuds/burnttongueontea
Summary: Just because Aziraphale and Crowley are now human, doesn't mean they're willing to fulfill ALL human social obligations. Notable red line: deadly boring parties.Aziraphale copes by abandoning ship, Crowley copes by striking up conversation with the nearest child. Unfortunately, like most conversations with the under-fives, it all gets a bit more philosophical than he bargained for.Seeing it motionless like that, you feel startled by it, really: by what a perfect and intricate and beautiful thing a bird is.It’s definitely dead.‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asks.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: time, as a symptom [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1577767
Comments: 2
Kudos: 40





	what time may do

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of a series imagining how Aziraphale and Crowley’s retirement might have looked, if Adam had decided to make them human when he restored reality. Mostly the fics work as standalones too. They all have soft and gentle endings, but some contain more mortality-related angst than others – so please do check the tags before choosing which ones to read!

‘Bloody rude, to leave a party early.’

Aziraphale rolls his eyes, pulling his coat off a hook.

‘It’s not by choice.’

‘Can’t I drive you?’

‘No. It’s an eye test, you’ll only increase everyone’s suffering if you come along. Besides, you just said yourself, it’s rude to leave.’ 

‘That’s different.’

‘How?’

‘Cause _you’re_ the one Lou invited. I’m just plus-one.’

‘Not true,’ says Aziraphale, fastening the last button on his coat and leaning forward to kiss Crowley hastily. ‘Listen, get a taxi home if you don’t want to stay, free will and all that. But you’re not coming to the optician.’

He opens the front door and rummages in his pocket for the car key, blinking down at it with a worrying level of discomfort. Then turns and kisses Crowley goodbye again, with the distracted air of one who’s forgotten he did so already.

‘Right, well. Safe travels. If you see a wall, steer away from it.’

‘Crowley, that was _six years ago_.’

‘Very significant occult number, six. History rhymes.’

‘I’ll see you at four,’ says Aziraphale firmly, and shuts Lou’s door.

*

Six years, since they moved out to the Downs. Can that actually be correct? Six years? Somebody, surely, has been meddling with all the clocks Crowley comes into contact with. Slowing down the mechanism. He’s pretty sure he once spent six years getting a single politician to muck up his education reforms (and yes, he rues that one, he really does). In certain centuries, six years was a sort of mid-length nap. What used to be a one-major-assignment kind of a timespan has suddenly become capacious, interminable; too impossibly full of crucial details for one head to accommodate the whole of it.

Half of him theorises that it's actually a species trait, the processing and perception of time. The other half of him just blames the cumulative minutes he has spent waiting for Aziraphale to _hurry up and finish breakfast already._ Sometimes he thinks it would be easier to convince his plants to walk out the front door of the cottage.

He decides not to leave immediately.

Instead, he drifts back through to the dining room, where guests are milling around enjoying glasses of wine and knowing chat. This is the party to mark the completion of Lou’s newest book. Not the actual launch party, which will happen up in London and is for the journalists, really. The private one, the I-owe-lots-of-favours one, put on for the People Who Have Helped. Such as busybodies from her publisher, and experts who kindly shared their research. (How Aziraphale is supposed to have helped, apart from being Lou’s most distracting neighbour, Crowley could not possibly explain.)

He casts his eyes around the room, thinking that there must be _someone_ in here he could get along with. Those in attendance are very well-dressed; not well-dressed like Crowley, who is always on the lookout for a sharp cut, or like Aziraphale, with his set-pieces, so lovingly tailored and proper. Not even like Lou, spare and serious and monochrome. Their attire is brightly-coloured and a little quirky, in that on-trend way where the right sort of quirky is terribly specific. He tries to tune into conversations to find out which ones might be accommodating to a somewhat socially awkward and decidedly unliterary ex-demon, and catches the following words: ‘new gym membership’, ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, ‘Tube strikes’.

He gives up.

It’s not his scene. Despite the suspiciously insistent claims that double-booking was an accident, and the surfeit of writerly types hanging around, he knows it’s not Aziraphale’s scene either. They’ve both attended far too many human parties to have much patience for ones where nobody does anything except stand around saying boring things politely.

In the kitchen he finds Lou, tossing vinaigrette through an extremely large bowl of salad. Her focused expression and the tense set of her shoulders suggest to Crowley that, despite being her own party, it’s not exactly _her_ scene, either.

That’s the problem with these sorts of gatherings. They’re nobody’s idea of fun. They just happen.

He wonders absently if he invented them at some point, and forgot about it.

(Forgetting about things – that’s one to add to the list he’s going to send to Adam. The list of complaints. He should also, he thinks, while rolling his shoulders slightly, add back ache.)

‘How’s the cooking going?’ he asks.

‘Demandingly,’ grumbles Lou.

‘More or less demanding than the literary lights of London out there?’ Before she can open her mouth again, he goes on: ‘No need to answer that, actually. There’s a reason you’re in here.’

‘Could you lower your voice a bit? I’ve not yet convinced them I’m a lovably taciturn hermit.’

‘Well, you’re not going to convince them by making them salad.’

‘Fair point,’ says Lou. She puts the salad aside and opens the oven to remove a baking tray covered in puff-pastry bites.

At this point, a rather small individual with a pale, anxious face and a raincloud of dark curls comes sidling in through the back door. This is Beth. She’s almost five. She’s what they refer to in the trade as a poppet.

‘Mummy,’ she says.

‘Hmmm?’ replies Lou, picking up a palette knife.

‘Mummy. I need to show you something.’

‘What is it?’

‘There’s a bird at the end of the garden and I think it’s sick.’

Lou sighs, puts the palette knife back down for a moment, and ruffles the raincloud with her fingers.

‘Can I come and look in ten minutes?’

‘Okay.’

‘Watch yourself near the counter, this stuff’s hot. Go on, wait for me in the garden somewhere.’

‘You might need to hide Beth a little better, too,’ points out Crowley. ‘If you want to maintain an aloof and inaccessible literary mystique.’

‘Fine, I give up. It was never going to work. Not nearly enough of a man.’

Beth is still hovering nervously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

‘Really sorry, love,’ says Lou. ‘I’ll come and look at it soon. But I need to stay here and do the food just now.’

Crowley hesitates for a second, and then says:

‘You can show it to me, if you like.’

Beth looks directly at him for the first time since coming in, with distinct apprehension. It’s not that the two of them are strangers; they’ve crossed paths plenty of times. He even came over as an emergency babysitter one rainy Saturday afternoon, when it was last minute and nobody else could help. They did interesting things with playdough at her kitchen table. But that was a year or two ago, already. She must have more or less forgotten it by now, and he’s a big tall adult in a dark jacket. Also, you know. An ex-demon.

‘That’s very nice of Anthony, isn’t it, Beth?’ prompts Lou. ‘Will you show him where it is?’

‘Okay,’ she answers, with every evidence of uncertainty.

‘Come on,’ says Crowley.

They go out through the back door. He glances to his left while they walk, as he always does in Lou's garden, to see that narrow slice of grey and grumpy sea on the horizon. Beth takes him further than he expects, right down to the slightly wild bit at the bottom of the big garden, underneath the old oak trees. Where Lou has her writing shed. Crowley’s never noticed Beth exploring the outdoors much before, especially not alone. _Guess that makes four of us avoiding this party_ , he thinks.

Once they’re under the cover of the larger oak tree, Beth stops abruptly, and points at a brown, speckled bird about the size of a lemon lying on its side in the grass. Crowley crouches down and examines it. A fledgling of some sort. Intact. Seeing it motionless like that, you feel startled by it, really: by what a perfect and intricate and beautiful thing a bird is.

It’s definitely dead.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asks.

Crowley looks up at the tree. He doesn’t see a nest anywhere in the branches, so it can’t have fallen out of one.

‘It… probably got lost and couldn’t find its way back to its parents, I guess.’

Beth pulls at the strap of her dungarees uncertainly.

‘It got lost, and it needed to rest for a bit?’

‘Yeah?’ he replies, realising as he does so that it is probably not helpful to intone this as another question.

Beth is still doing the nervous-shuffle she was doing while waiting for Lou, still tugging on the dungaree strap. She bends down to look more closely at the little bird, and then straightens up.

‘Can we do something to help it?’

‘No, I don’t think we can, Beth.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s… dead.’

Beth frowns, reasoning this out.

‘Do you think its parents are looking for it?’ she asks.

‘Um,’ says Crowley, very cautiously. ‘They might be.’

‘We could find some berries and leave them next to its beak,’ she suggests, raising her little hands and spreading them out as if making a contribution in a boardroom meeting. ‘And then when it rains a drop of water might go into its mouth, and it will wake up and eat the berries, and then it will start calling for its parents and they’ll come and look after it again.’

There’s silence for several seconds.

‘What about,’ he ventures, ‘putting it somewhere we can’t see it any more?’

Beth goes over this suggestion in her head. It takes her a while. Her face becomes a bit sad.

‘But then its parents won’t be able to find it.’

‘Oh.’

Crowley is beginning to suspect that this conversation is beyond his paygrade, as family acquaintance. But he’ll be damned (re-damned?) if he’s going to fob the kid off with a ‘talk to your mother’.

He starts looking around him for any materials that could be useful for picking up a small dead bird, and moving it discreetly into the bushes.

What he spots is a large, flat stone laid carefully on the ground, near the base of the big oak tree.

 _Aha_ , he thinks.

‘Do you remember your mum’s dog, Beth?’

She stares at him.

‘No.’

‘Well. Fair enough. You’re tiny. Thing is. Your mum used to have a dog. But the dog got very old, so… she died. Same as the bird. And your mum buried her in the garden just there.’

He points at the flat stone. Beth appears bemused, but she’s following his words receptively enough. Crowley pushes on.

‘So. Um. Even though your mum is sad she couldn’t help. When she comes down here to write, she sees the stone and remembers that the dog’s still there.’

Beth is still staring at him in silence.

‘And that,’ finishes Crowley awkwardly, ‘…helps.’

Beth turns her gaze slowly from Crowley to the little grave, with a terribly serious expression.

‘So I’m thinking this. Maybe we can leave the bird next to your mum’s dog. Not bury it if you don’t want to, just leave it. What do you reckon? Sound okay?’

Beth nods in slightly dazed fashion.

‘Yeah?’ says Crowley.

‘Yeah.’

He finds a rusty old spade leaning up against the side of the shed, and slides the bird onto it as gently as possible, then lowers it down to the surface of the old collie’s plain, unlettered grave. Beth follows him at a remove of about two metres, scrutinising his actions judiciously.

Once he’s put the spade back, he goes over to examine his handiwork, and realises that the bird looks less undisturbed than it did before, even though he was very careful not to damage it. A few of its wing feathers have been shifted out of place. He experiences a brief urge to kneel down and smooth them out again with his fingers, but he decides to resist it.

Instead he looks at the kid standing next to him. She’s very still, now, looking down at the bird, her worried little jitters replaced by an air of faraway contemplation.

And he's reminded, for some reason, of another curly-haired child. Not one he would have interacted with like this. A boy, the youngest son of a family he’d known briefly, landlords on the ground floor of a dilapidated tenement building in St Petersburg that Crowley had occupied for a summer. A boy he used to enjoy watching, from the upstairs window in his rented rooms. Constantly out in the courtyard, though he didn't seem to have many friends to chase around - he had to amuse himself instead, finding interesting little things dropped on the ground to make toys out of, playing with the scrappy cats that frequented the area. Sometimes he would sit completely by himself for minutes at a time; daydreaming, maybe. Crowley never saw other kids doing that, not in that place.

Most of the time, with those very ordinary humans, he would only be able to guess at their lives after he moved on to a new assignment and left. Only rarely would you get to close the loop: a chance encounter at a social event, a name mentioned in a biography, or, in this case, a memorial bench. Stand up and turn around after a perfectly routine meeting with your counterpart, and there it is. Pressing into your backs the whole time, unnoticed. Shy, underfed Ivanushka with the unusual surname, that boy you never spoke to once, turned into an old man who liked to sit quietly in St James’s Park. And his grandchildren will remember him for that. You won’t ever know how he came to live in London, or what exactly he spent his cross-cultural life doing, but you’ll know that his bench is there, and that’s not worth nothing.

It occurs to Crowley that he will probably never have to mourn Beth. Won’t have to watch her generation of humans disappear, or any of the ones after it. Somebody else will grieve, for them. It won’t be on him.

‘Beth!’ comes a shout, floating down from the other end of the garden. ‘Anthony! Food’s ready!’

‘We’d better leave it alone now,’ he says, taking a few steps back towards the house. ‘Beth?’

She’s still absorbed in staring. Doesn’t seem to have heard him.

‘Come on, Beth.’

He reverses his steps and, very tentatively, puts a hand out to take hold of one of hers. He’s half-expecting her to draw it away, but instead he feels her fingers tighten around his, although she doesn’t look up from the little dead bird.

He pulls on it, and she follows. They walk back up to the house together.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Once again, the lyrical connection is slightly indirect, but the title comes from Joanna Newsom's Anecdotes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjBGuX3dp5M


End file.
